This is my absolute favorite video of Jerry Garcia ever. Weird huh? Has nothing to do with the Grateful Dead. This is Jerry, sitting in with Ruben Blades, in some random hotel ballroom. From the looks of it, it appears to be around 1989-90.

Not one person in attendance was there to see Jerry Garcia. I wonder how many even knew who he was? Fast forward to 5:45 in the video, when Jerry is introduced, and takes a solo. The pure joy of just playing, of being anonymous….I get goosebumps everytime I watch it.

I have a PH.D in Grateful Dead and have read many books about the band. Jerry felt trapped by his fame for much of his life. Being a God to an army of devoted Deadheads, was great for us, but not so great for him.

In this setting, none of that pressure. Just music, which is what he loved most. Playing music with great musicians. This is Jerry, as happy as I’ve ever seen him.

Again, if you are a Deadhead, fast forward to 5:45 and tell me the hair on your neck didn’t spring to attention. This is how I choose to remember him on his birthday.

One of the under appreciated outrages of Obama’s first term was his NLRB treatment of Boeing. Here is a good summary from QandO,

One of the reasons the South has thrived while the Rust Belt has, well, rusted, is companies have taken advantage of the “right to work” rules in most Southern states to locate there without fear of work stoppages at every turn. That would seem to be a fundamental right that any business should enjoy, the right to locate their business where they feel their best interests are served. What the government is saying is that’s not true – if you have union employees elsewhere.

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

…..What’s is happening here is government has chosen to take sides and is attempting to intimidate Boeing. The side it has picked – surprise – is the union side. And it plans to use its power to attempt to force a company into doing something which is not in its best business interests, despite the lip service Solomon gives that “right”. But there’s no “hostile business climate” here, is there?

Bottom line?

The company also said it had decided to expand in South Carolina in part to protect business continuity and to reduce the damage to its finances and reputation from future work stoppages.

And in a free country, Boeing would have every right to expect to be able to do that without interference.

The NLRB is back in the news again, and so is the so called Nuclear Option. The media says Republicans caved and gave in to the Democrats on the Nuclear Option. Here’s NY Magazine,

Unlike the last time Democrats threatened to change the Senate rules, and backed down without winning anything, this time they won something important: They broke Senate Republicans’ ability to hold presidential appointments hostage. It’s a total victory for the Democrats.

However:

Republicans got one face-saving concession: Democrats have to pick new names for the NLRB. This became an issue because Obama tried to execute an end-run around Congress by appointing them to their positions when Congress was functionally, though not technically, in recess, and was struck down by the Republican-controlled D.C. circuit court.

If the Democrats agreed to have two new appointments made to the NLRB, aren’t they at least tacitly admitting the current two appointments are illegal? And if so, what does that make any rulings the current NLRB made during that time it was illegally constituted? Common sense says those rulings should be invalidated, don’t you think?

The 2012 trading year has come to a close. I’m happy to report that our Buy List had another market-beating year. The 20 stocks on the Crossing Wall Street Buy List gained 14.56% while the S&P 500 gained 13.41%. This is the sixth year in a row that we have beaten the market.

You’d have to be crazy not to read his blog.

JPM, 43.97 Dec 31, 4:00PM EST

Too Big To Fail on The Whale. The London Whale trading fiasco that cost $5 billion in loses last year is but a distant memory.

Food

DPZ, 43.55 Dec 31, 4:01PM EST

A tech company that sells Pizza. Led by dynamic CEO, company is expanding aggressively internationally. Already had a big run, so kind of late to the pizza party, but still like it.

Retail

TJX, 42.45 Dec 31, 4:06PM EST

Well run company, blah economy, affordable fashion and bargain shopping in vogue for another year.

Energy

BTU, 26.61 Dec 31, 4:02PM EST

A play and the turn on coal, based mostly in faith that CHINA is recovering.

It had barely stopped raining, the power was still out and millions are struggling for the basics like food, clean water and gasoline. What a great time to rudely, condescendingly and arrogantly declare the cause of the storm to be, you guessed it, global warming ! Not only that, but if you are not on board with this instant analysis, you’re stupid! Wonderful.

Hey if Business Weak says so, it must be true. After all, they’re journalists. For example, they were totally spot on in August 1976 when they wrote this,

Climatologists have advanced a number of theories to explain why the world’s climate is getting worse. The dominant school maintains that the world is becoming cooler, resulting in a loss of arable land at the higher latitudes and major shifts in rainfall patterns.

–Business Week, “The world’s climate is getting worse” August 2, 1976

Hey, don’t fret, Business Weak hedged their bet in the very next sentence,

“A second school believes the world is warming, with equally serious consequences.”

How convenient. Heads they win, tails you lose. Nothing says have your cake and eat it too like being a liberal environmentalist!

Colder, warmer, who cares, let’s not get bogged down in details…..the climate is getting worse and its our fault. We MUST do something about it! It is so transparently obvious that climate is simply a political tool for liberals looking for new ways to control and influence more aspects of society.

New York City has seen hurricanes before. In fact, they occurred more frequently in the 1800′s than today,

Before the 1938 New England hurricane, it had been several decades since a hurricane of any significance adversely affected the northeastern Atlantic coastline. Nevertheless, history has shown that several severe hurricanes have affected the Northeast, although with much less frequency in comparison to areas of the Gulf, Florida, and southeastern Atlantic coastlines.

The Great September Gale of 1815 (the term hurricane was not yet common in the American vernacular), which hit New York City directly as a Category 3 hurricane, caused extensive damage and created an inlet that separated the Long Island resort towns of the Rockaways and Long Beach into two separate barrier islands.

The 1821 Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane, a Category 4 storm which made four separate landfalls in Virginia, New Jersey, New York, and southern New England. The storm created the highest recorded storm surge in Manhattan of nearly 13 feet and severely impacted the farming regions of Long Island and southern New England.

The 1869 Saxby Gale affected areas in Northern New England, decimating the Maine coastline and the Canadian Outer Banks. It was the last major hurricane to affect New England until the 1938 storm.

The 1893 New York hurricane, a Category 2 storm, directly hit the city itself, causing a great storm surge that pummeled the coastline, completely removing the Long Island resort town of Hog Island.

So what caused these storms Business Weak, cow farts? Pretty sure there were no SUV’s roaming the streets of Manhattan in the 1800′s.

The difference between then and now is population density. In 1890 New York City there were 1.5 million people. As of 2011, there are 8.2 million in NYC. Oh yea, then there’s this,

Battery Park City WAS the ocean when the above referenced storms happened. It is nothing but landfill taken from the digging at the World Trade Center project.

The reasons for environmental decline are complex, but population factors play a significant role. Today, approximately 3 billion people — about half of the world’s population — live within 200 kilometers of a coastline. By 2025, that figure is likely to double.

Is it logic or stupid to think that the sames storms we’ve had throughout history, like those in the 1800′s cited above, would have a far greater impact today?

And what about today, Sandy? Well, kudos to the New York Times Dot Earth blog for having an open mind and publishing a balanced view of what might have made Sandy such a devastating storm.

Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said Sandy wasn’t boosted by global warming — the storm merely revealed natural forces at work.

“Great events can have little causes,” he told the New York Times. “In this case, the immediate cause is most likely little more that the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extratropical storm.”

Here’s a thought from Patrick J. Michaels, the climatologist best known for his work for the libertarian Cato Institute:

By any standard, this is an impressive cyclone for our latitude. You might want to check Ludlum’s “Early American Hurricanes” for the Snow Hurricane of 1804, which was earlier and a bit further north — but NYC showed a pretty similar barometric pressure. Are you familiar with his great series of books on pre-1900 weather?

Businness Weak on the other hand, chose the full on moonbat, reactionary route. We constantly hear from folks on the left, like Business Weak, that “The science is settled”. If they are done with science, maybe they’d go for a little history lesson?

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton is set to play a central part in the Democratic convention, aides said, and will formally place President Obama’s name into nomination by delivering a prime-time speech designed to present a forceful economic argument for why Mr. Obama deserves to win a second term.

Several times in recent weeks President Obama has invoked Bill Clinton and his jobs record, trying to frame this election as a choice between the Clinton economy we had then and the Bush economy we have now. Who could blame the President when the actual numbers are so bad? It’s a good strategy. In fact, the first time I noticed President Obama reaching for the Clinton administration lifeline was during his now infamous “You didn’t build that” speech.

But you know what, I’m not going to see us gut the investments that grow our economy to give tax breaks to me or Mr. Romney or folks who don’t need them. So I’m going to reduce the deficit in a balanced way. We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts. We can make another trillion or trillion-two, and what we then do is ask for the wealthy to pay a little bit more. (Applause.) And, by the way, we’ve tried that before — a guy named Bill Clinton did it. We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires.

We created Mr. President? You were an Associate Attorney for Davis, Miner & Barnhill and a State Senator for the final three years of the Clinton administration. One that voted present more than anything else. We?

Lecturer / Senior Lecturer 1992 to 2004
University of Chicago Law School
• Taught courses in General Law, Constitutional Law and Government Affairs

Ah yes…constitutional law expert….

Photo: The eating crow summit.

There is a fatal flaw in the President Obama-Clinton comparison. President Obama does not believe what Bill Clinton believed about businesses or the economy. The differences go far beyond Clinton’s vigorous defense of both Romney and Bain. How about the signature domestic accomplishment of the Clinton administration, overturned by fiat, at the pen of Obama’s HHS secretary. Here is a good piece by Mickey Kaus,

…If today’s action stands–surviving legal as well as political challenge–it will allow HHS to let those states that don’t really want to require welfare recipients to work to not require them to work. Before 1996, HHS would be preventing states that did want to require welfare recipients to work from requiring them to work. Still a big difference between then and today. But not as much as between then and yesterday.

15. Souljah Opening Available: Obama could turn the HHS rule into a big political plus if he dramatically ordered Secretary Sebelius to withdraw it, saying he wanted to encourage people to work, not go on the dole. But that’s not his style.

Update:Dave Weigel points out the long-term implications of the administration’s legal argument: Once HHS has the power to fiddle with work requirements, even worse may be on the way. The Mark Greenbergs are just getting started.

Given the economic performance, lack of leadership and overall malaise, the Clinton comparison is not the one on voters minds.

Bruce McQuain from Blackfive joined us once again for Someone You Should Know, our weekly tribute to the troops. Bruce spent 28 years in the U.S. Army and he is a veteran of the Vietnam war. He brings a perspective and understanding to these stories that we could never match.

I must say, a very fitting finale to Someone You Should Know on WRKO. A story about three Medal of Honor receipients from the Battle of Saipan

Thank you Bruce for all you’ve contributed to Pundit Review Radio. Nothing brought more positive feedback than this segment. I can say without a doubt, that whatever time and preparation it took you tell these stories, it was appreciated by countless listeners of the show.

On Boston’s Talk Station WRKO since 2005, Pundit Review Radio is where the old media meets the new. Each week we give voice to the work of the most influential leaders in the new media/citizen journalist revolution. Called “groundbreaking” by Talkers Magazine, this unique show brings the best of the blogs to the radio every Sunday evening from 6-8pm on AM680 WRKO, Boston’s Talk Station.